“You don’t,” Lucy said. “On the surface there is nothing illegal about any of this. You drew a pretty picture connecting Victoria’s murder to the discovery of the Albrights’ bones, but that’s not even enough. Stan’s comment about Monroe being a straw buyer—even if we could get the judge to let you testify to his statement—means nothing. He didn’t flat out say he didn’t know Monroe, he just didn’t make it sound like he did.”

Lucy looked at the list of names that had been running around in her head ever since Max laid out her theories last night. Six friends from college … involved allegedly in an illegal gambling operation years ago … what were they doing now? Had their crimes caught up with them? Could these murders be revenge … for someone they hurt more than two decades ago?

“You’re thinking,” Sean said.

“It’s … nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“If we assume they had committed crimes together in college, maybe one of their past acts caught up with them.”

“That’s a long time to wait for revenge,” Max said.

“And almost impossible to follow up on,” Lucy said. “Unless there was a complaint filed.”

“That, I can find out,” Sean said. “I’ll dig around and see if anyone filed a complaint in college about any of these people. It won’t take much time—a few calls to the right people.”

“Revenge is a solid motive,” Lucy said, “but I keep coming back to Denise’s family being murdered. It’s … overkill. Unless the kids saw something, but Tori got Becky out of volleyball practice Friday and that tells me that they were either planning on running or … or what if Glen was taking the kids out of town for safety because Denise was planning on going to the authorities about whatever she knew?”

“But they didn’t get out fast enough,” Max said.

“The revenge angle is worth looking at,” Sean said, “but our working theory—and no, we can’t prove it—is that Harrison Monroe created HFM to launder his illegal gambling profits.”

“Which you learned from this Tompkins guy who hasn’t seen Monroe in over twenty years,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry to play the devil’s advocate here, but no judge is going to give us a warrant based on an unproven—and uninvestigated—accusation more than two decades old.”