I clear my throat. ‘Good morning. I’m more awake now—you said something on the phone about a severed hand?’

She zooms up my street and does a U-turn at the end. ‘I’ll let Dr Norman fill you in on that. First let me tell you about Vasquez. He’s been digging through the data on Biggs’s computer. There’s some weird porn in the browsing history, but so far nothing else suspicious. No significant correspondence with anyone outside our suspect pool, no email receipts from transactions we didn’t already know about, no google searches for how to fake your own death.’

‘How weird is the porn?’

‘Vasquez only said there was nothing illegal.’

‘But potentially embarrassing? Worthy of blackmail?’

‘I assume so. Biggs was married, with a daughter and a senior position at the college. The porn wouldn’t have to be too weird before it could be used for leverage. What are you thinking?’

I rub my eyes. ‘Not sure. Probably nothing. How did Vasquez go with the dates marked on the wall planner?’

‘Nothing so far.’

‘Too much data to sift through?’

‘Too little.’ Thistle takes a turn-off towards the field office. ‘He’s got some kind of deep-learning algorithm working on it. It’s supposed to be good at spotting patterns, but only works with huge swathes of data. Twelve dates doesn’t give it much to work with.’

She seems more relaxed today. Maybe she’s decided that me following her to the courthouse wasn’t too bad. Or maybe she’s just hiding her anger better. She could be counting down the hours until this case is solved and she never has to see me again.

The thought is painful, and I force it out of my mind. ‘Well, we can’t give it more dates,’ I say. ‘But can we give it clues for the sort of thing we’re looking for?’

‘I assume so. What are we looking for?’

‘Missing persons or violent crime within a hundred miles of the dump.’

‘If you’re thinking that Biggs was trying to tell us what was happening to him by pointing to similar cases, there’s no reason to assume they’d be local.’

I drum my fingers on my knees. ‘If it was just similar cases, he wouldn’t know the exact dates offhand. And that wouldn’t help us identify his abductor.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Thistle says. ‘But if Biggs was pointing us to the past crimes of the perp, he wouldn’t know those dates either.’

‘Not unless he and the perp were very close,’ I say. ‘And had been for more than a year. Where are we at with Shannon Luxford?’

‘No sign of him anywhere—including in travel records. So he hasn’t left the country, but he might have left the state. His car hasn’t, though. Licence plate tracking hasn’t seen anything.’

‘Are his parents alive?’