Staying close to the building but out of the lights, she listened until she saw them move from the side of the building into the parking lot. She let them get ahead, then followed them, weaving through the rows of cars so she was out of sight. The laughter stopped. She heard the click of a car unlocking, then she saw headlights. Then a door opening, closing. She hurried now to see the row where the lights were coming from. She walked there slowly, quietly. The lights went off. The car was not leaving.

She got to the row and began to move along the back of each car, looking inside, listening for sound.

She walked until she heard them. The unmistakable sound of a man moaning. It was soft, coming through a small crack in the window. She slid to the far side of the adjacent car and looked through the windows. It was too dark to see, until a car rolled past on the other side, briefly shining a light through the windshields of each car in her row. It was quick, but unmistakable—Chief Watkins sitting in the driver’s seat. Eyes closed. Face contorted with anticipation, the melding together of pleasure and frustration as the woman leaned over him from the passenger side, her head moving up and down. The light was gone, but not the sound.

Nic walked around the car that was shielding her view. She could see that Watkins’s car was gray, but it was not until she had a clear view that she saw the make. A charcoal-gray pickup truck. Chief Watkins. The woman.

She squatted down behind the truck, heart pounding now.

Think.

The glass was intact on both taillights, but she couldn’t tell if the bulbs were out. She would have to wait until he turned the ignition.

Another laugh. The smell of a cigarette from the window. Something about fifty bucks and that’s pretty steep and then, you should have asked before, asshole.

A door opening, closing. The woman stumbling away.

Then Watkins in a cruel, mocking voice. Cheap whore.

And then the ignition. The lights. Both of them working. Still, it had been two weeks.

She hurried back to the other side of the adjacent car, and managed to snap a photo with her phone as Chief Watkins drove away.

Chapter Nineteen

Day fourteen

Mick does not come home. This is the first time he has not been home all day and now, apparently, all evening.

He must be comfortable with me, with the way I am with Alice. And, of course, he is always watching.

But then I think that he does not want to be here. That he is still hunting for whatever he lost when the woman who lived here before me died.

“I’m hungry,” Alice says. She reaches her arm through the bars and I take her hand and press it to my lips.