Quentin and Diana headed back up to the site where Simon’s box prison waited so any evidence there could be tagged and collected, and Hollis and DeMarco went to check in with their acting medical examiner.

Bishop and Miranda went to talk to Megan Hales’s family. It was still early when they reached the Hales home out in the valley, but since Finn had called ahead, they found her parents and teenage sister sitting around the breakfast table with coffee, all three still clearly in shock.

It was a comfortable, sprawling house, innumerable family photos the clearest indication of strong family ties. In virtually every grouping, Megan’s bright smile as a baby and child and young woman beamed out.

“I thought she was safe,” Megan’s mother, Sylvia, said to the agents, her voice curiously hollow. She stared down at the hands wrapped around her coffee cup, then lifted her anxious gaze to search their faces. “She’d talked about leaving ever since Paul . . . So I thought she had. She was—was embarrassed and self-conscious because everybody knew, and she just wanted to get away. To escape from the goldfish bowl, she said. I wished she’d write or call, of course I did, wished she’d let us know how she was doing, but I didn’t really expect . . . She was young, and a new life would be—would have been—exciting. There would have been so much to do. Starting a new life. She was—would have been—busy. We knew that. So when she didn’t call or write—”

Miranda, hearing the desperate need for reassurance, said quietly, “There was no way any of you could have known she didn’t leave the valley. Every indication was there that she did. You can’t blame yourselves.”

Frank Hales said, “Is that why she—why he picked her? Because she was going to leave? Because she was alone?” There was something in his voice that said it was a question that had tortured him.

“We aren’t sure,” Bishop told him. “Can you tell us about Megan? What she was like? Who her friends were?”

“You don’t think one of her friends—”

“No, probably not, but everything you tell us can help us to understand her. And understanding her could help us to find her killer.”

“She was a good girl,” her father said harshly. “No trouble at all as a child. Just like other little girls, she was horse crazy, rode all the time. She grew out of that by the time she was a teenager, when she—when she and Paul started to go steady.” He hurried on. “When she finished her schooling she went to work as an accountant, helping to keep the books for us at the office. She was busy. She didn’t have time to—to fool around. She was working for her future, for a good future. Planning it all out . . .”

“It wasn’t Paul. Was it?” Sylvia’s voice was thin.

Bishop shook his head. “He left Salem two months before and didn’t return until late last fall. His movements have been accounted for.”