The only photograph they discovered on the first floor showing Lisa Warwick with a man was a framed snapshot of her with her parents at her graduation from nursing school.

Mendez stood in the middle of the living room and took in the space. Lisa Warwick hadn’t been as tidy as Karly Vickers. She had clutter, but her clutter was loosely organized all around the place: A pile of magazines on the ottoman, a stack of books on the end table, a bag of knitting on the floor next to the sofa. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign anyone else had been in the house.

“Somebody had to see something,” Hicks said. “We just have to find that somebody.”

On the other hand, Mendez recalled, Bundy had abducted two of his victims in broad daylight from a crowded lakeshore state park—one within feet of her friends—and no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

In the blink of an eye a woman could be gone, sucked into a terrible alternate universe where existence meant unspeakable torture and unbearable pain, a world beyond the darkest imagining, unseen by everyone but the killer and his victim.

They went up the stairs to check out the two bedrooms and the bath. The smaller of the bedrooms was undisturbed. In the bathroom, someone had left a towel on the floor next to the tub. Makeup and costume jewelry littered the vanity. She had been getting ready for something.

In the master bedroom the bed was unmade. Clothes had been tossed over a chair. A framed photo sat on one of the nightstands. Lisa Warwick posing with a small group of people, Jane Thomas among them. Three women and a good-looking man in his mid-thirties, all in business attire, each with a glass of champagne in hand.

A celebration, Mendez thought. A happy moment. But it didn’t strike him as the sort of photo a woman would keep on her night-stand. Except for one thing: the way Lisa Warwick was looking up at the man on her left.

“Ten bucks says this is the guy she was having the affair with,” he said. “Look how she’s looking at him.”

“And ten bucks says he’s married,” Hicks said. “Look at how he’s not looking at her.”

“Like his life depends on it.”

“Or half of everything he owns.”

They darkened the room and repeated the black light test they had done on Karly Vickers’s bed with no result. This time as Mendez passed the light over the sheets small dots lit up like tiny fluorescent stars. Not many of them, but enough to suggest a story of lovers in bed, a drop of semen here and there—spillage when taking off a condom perhaps, or maybe during oral sex.

“Looks like we’ve got us a suspect,” Mendez said. “Let’s bag that photograph and go find out who he is.”

Chapter 24

24