“One more thing,” she says, getting up. “The wastebaskets and the trash can under the kitchen sink were all empty. Liners gone too. I thought that was strange. Why take the trash with you if you’re going to leave the food behind?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LEE

Montrose and I are eating our lunch and playing bingo with the sex offender registry, parole records, and notes on recent LE contact with locals as we try to find who might have taken and assaulted Sophie Warner. There are four nearby whose crimes include rape. Two of those used a weapon. Only one of those held a woman captive.

According to the reports, Jim Coyle, forty-nine, lives barely two miles from the cabins in Lilliwaup. He is a truck driver for a small freight line based out of Port Townsend in nearby Jefferson County. He was arrested for kidnapping when he was twenty and sentenced to seven years. The incident involved a longtime girlfriend who had just broken up with him. He wanted one more chance, but she refused. He held her at gunpoint for more than four hours before releasing her. He claimed their sexual relations the day before had been consensual, but the young woman insisted otherwise.

At least at first.

Coyle pleaded guilty and served his time. Two years after his release, however, his victim appeared on national TV and told the world that she was sorry. She’d found God and wanted to make amends.

“He didn’t hurt me,” she told a chubby, bald TV psychologist. “It was partly my sin too.”

Semiexonerated or not, we decide to pay him a visit.

An hour later, we drive past the road to the cabins and find ourselves at Coyle’s address. Montrose has sharper eyes than I do. He sees the entrance to the Coyle property right away. It’s narrow—too narrow, I think, for a semi—and it’s shrouded under a canopy of big-leaf maples and hemlock trees.

“Creep lives here,” he announces, pulling in.

“And you do all this without GPS,” I say.

He shrugs. “GPS is for wusses.”

A man wearing paint-splattered blue jeans and a tank top emerges from a single-wide trailer at the top of the long, rutted driveway. A tuft of white chest hair protrudes over the top of his shirt. It’s so long I think that it might possibly be braidable.

By the time we park, Jim Coyle is right next to the driver’s side, looking us over with an unfriendly glare. “See the ‘No Trespassing’ sign?” His face is ruddy from the sun. His eyes are so brown that it is hard to distinguish the iris from the pupil. He doesn’t smile. In fact, it looks as if he hasn’t ever. He has no laugh lines on his face.

Montrose opens his door so Coyle has to step back, and I join him outside the car. As Montrose makes the introductions, it’s immediately apparent that Coyle is used to people like us stopping by uninvited.

“I know why you are here,” he says.