“No. I came back out. I’m in my car. It’s getting dark, and I don’t want to be in there with no lights. I’d keep thinking about the basement and what could be down there.”

“Any chance you could go back home, stay at your mother’s until things get sorted out?”

“No!” Her response was as angry as the last time he’d raised the issue. “That’s not my home anymore—this is my home. I’m not running off like a frightened little girl to my mommy, just because some asshole is playing games with me.”

But a frightened little girl is exactly what she sounded like to Gurney. A frightened little girl trying to act the way she thought a grown-up would act. The image filled him with an almost painful feeling of anxiety and responsibility.

“Okay,” he said, impulsively moving into the right lane and onto an exit ramp at the last second. “Stay where you are. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

After driving most of the way at eighty miles an hour, nineteen minutes later he was back in Syracuse on Kim Corazon’s rundown block, parked across the street from her apartment. Dusk had slipped into night, and Gurney hardly recognized the place he’d seen in the daylight two days earlier. He reached into his glove box and took out a heavy black metal flashlight.

As he walked across the street, Kim got out of her car. She looked jittery and embarrassed.

“I feel so stupid.” She crossed her arms tightly, as though she were trying not to shiver.

“Why?”

“Because it’s like I’m afraid of the dark. Afraid of my own apartment. I feel terrible, making you turn around like that.”

“Turning around was my idea. You want to wait out here while I take a look inside?”

“No! I’m not a complete infant. I’m coming in with you.”

Gurney remembered having this conversation before and decided not to argue.

Both the front door of the house and Kim’s apartment door were unlocked. They went inside, Gurney first, his flashlight illuminating the way. When he came to a set of switches on the hallway wall, he flipped them up and down with no effect. At the living-room door, he swept the flashlight around the space. He did the same at the doors to the bathroom and bedroom before moving on to the last room off the hall—the kitchen.

Moving the beam slowly around the room, he asked, “Did you check the place at all before you went back out to your car?”