We pull over to a spot along the highway that opens up to a magnificent view of Hood Canal. The water is so dark that it almost reads indigo—with or without sunglasses on. The tide is high, and a slight breeze is magnified by the channel, sending frothy white waves over the rocks that bolster the edge of the road along the shoreline. My phone service is spotty, but I’m able to retrieve the name of the Facebook poster. I ask Dispatch to get me an address. Montrose is on a call to the trucking company. It seems like he’s on hold a very long time.

“Okay,” he says. “You sure?”

He disconnects the call.

“Not at work yesterday,” he says. “Called in sick.”

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, because it’s not how things are done, but I do. “He’s going to be our guy,” I say. “Isn’t he?”

“I got a strong feeling about him.” Montrose runs on coffee and instincts. Many cops do.

I look down at the screen on my phone. “Let’s go pay Sheila Simmons a visit.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Facebook poster. Dispatch just came back with her contact info. She saw a pickup truck on the highway above the cabins about the time of Sophie’s abduction.”

He rolls his eyes, but gives in. “Which way?”

“South,” I answer, looking at her address on my phone. “She’s in Hoodsport.”

Sheila Simmons’s address leads us to a small yellow house adjacent to the public library. It’s as tidy as it is small. Not quite a tiny house, but I’d be surprised if she had more than seven hundred square feet to work with. I knock—after all, this is my big Facebook lead and Montrose is at once befuddled and irritated by the way people are circumventing the norm in favor of social media.

“First music,” he once lamented. “Then TV. Then news implodes. Is everything going to self-service? What happened to the days when everyone was on the same page because what we saw and read was handed to us?”

I ring the bell, but no answer.

“She’s probably out somewhere streaming some music,” he says without a trace of irony.

I tuck a business card with Call me scrawled on the back, and we head back to Shelton. On the way, we run the case over and over.

“Why would Coyle lie to us if he wasn’t knee deep into this?” Montrose asks.

“Why would he abduct a stranger and dump her body practically in his own backyard?” I ask.

“Freaks,” he says, “especially those who have been freaks for a long time, don’t think like other people, Lee. Their wires are all messed up. Someone who rapes and kills some woman, a stranger, doesn’t even see people as anything but a conquest. A prize. A chance to feel like they’re a big winner.”