LAURA STARR.

“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”

“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.

“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”

“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”

“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”

Stride did see.

The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.

DNA.

4
___________

Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.

Except Mary was sixteen.

To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent, without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.

“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.

She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.

“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.

Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.

“Five more minutes,” he said.