They go.

Natasha looks Daphne in the eye.

She throws the wrench at her and runs up the stairs. But there’s an echo, a second set of shoes running: the police coming down the first-floor hall to the basement door.

Guns drawn.

Natasha’s parents are up there already, yelling.

The first officer enters the basement and trains her gun on the first form she sees.

“Oh my God,” she says.

It’s not the person killing young women in Samhattan that she sees.

It’s Natasha Manska.

Yet…

“Oh my God,” the officer says again. “Oh my God.”

She didn’t fire. Yet the girl is dead.

An impossible shape halfway up the steps.

“Don’t let them see this,” she yells to the other officers. Then, to the basement: “We’re coming down! We are armed and we are coming down!”

But it’s hard to get past the thing on the stairs. Like a cardboard Halloween decoration, the limbs folded upon themselves.

And the face, flat to a wooden step, looking back up at her.

Later, when the officer describes the horrific scene over her CB, she will add a detail to the report that might’ve seemed trivial at any other time:

Someone was smoking and drinking in the basement. I smelled it. Smelled it passing me on the stairs.

But when she gets to the bottom, nobody’s there. And despite the thorough search by herself and her colleagues, and despite the screaming of the parents, too, no suspect is found.

The first thing the officer says into her CB, her voice full of defeat, is this:

“We have to do more. Whatever we’re doing…we’re not doing enough. We have to do more.”

McGowan already is doing more.

She stands facing the three men and one woman like she would if they were her subordinates in the military. She’s well past making good decisions. She knows this. She accepts this. What’s good anyway? She lied to all four in bringing them here to the former sugar factory on Milton Street. She can hardly remember what she said, exactly, but she knows she used threats and force and even blackmail. That was all thanks to the chat Zach Gold left up on his smart TV at home. No, of course she doesn’t know for certain these four have done anything deserving of jail, but they’re also just young enough not to know that. Still, they know this isn’t right.

They understand they shouldn’t be tied to chairs with rope.

They keep saying as much.

“You’re the one going to jail for this,” Trina McDay says. Trina wears all black. A band name in silver across her chest. Rope across her chest too. McGowan barely hears her.

“She’s gonna kill us,” Evan Patrick says. “She’s police gone crazy. Look at her eyes.”

“You have to let us go,” Bjorn Davison says. But McGowan is more interested in the band patches on his jean jacket.

They’ve been talking like this since she brought the fourth, Zach Gold, into the abandoned space. McGowan didn’t plan on doing this. Not exactly this way. She hasn’t planned anything, seen anything, or really even heard anything since leaving Chief Pollen at the Wild Stallion.