She was going to give it one more shot. “Anything else that you can tell us that might be helpful?”

“Nope. But I guess I have been thinking about Troy’s storage shed.”

A.L. put his pen down. “I’ve been to Troy Whitman’s house. There’s no storage shed.”

“Not there. At Alcamay Corners. He rents a unit there.” The man stood up. “Just saying, it might be a good idea if somebody checked that.”

Twelve

Alcamay Corners. Everybody in Baywood knew the intersection of Alcamay Road and Main Street. On one corner was the Alcamay Funeral Home, the biggest and busiest funeral home in Baywood. On the second corner was a cemetery, making it a quick and convenient trip for the dead. On the third, a restaurant. They had a nice room for the funeral lunches. On the fourth and final, rows and rows of storage sheds. Maybe the dead people’s furniture got stored there.

“Fuck,” A.L. said when Rena got back to the room after escorting Pete Seoul out. They’d hardly been able to get him out fast enough.

“You don’t really think...”

“I don’t know what I think. But we need to take a look. Right now,” A.L. said. “Not only do we have a storage shed that we haven’t looked at, we’ve got an unexplained absence if both Pete and Cory are right that Troy didn’t show up for work until 9:00.”

“Are you going to call Troy? Leah?”

“Nope,” A.L. said. They’d done a property search on their names. Standard procedure. Nothing had come up. A rental unit wouldn’t.

“We’ll need a warrant,” Rena said. “I’ll figure out who owns those storage sheds and which unit belongs to Troy.”

“Make it quick, Morgan. I’m going to give Faster’s office a heads-up.”

Forty minutes later, they were on their way. The owner had agreed to meet them at Unit 49, which Troy had rented for the prior seven months.

“I want to know but I don’t want to know,” Rena said. “Does that make sense?”

It did. The possibilities of what they might find in the shed were enough to make the most experienced cop shaky. A.L. could feel his own stomach churning. Bad things happening to a child were horrific enough, but the idea that the parent could be responsible was so goddamn dark that A.L.’s chest felt heavy and it was work to breathe. “He’d have fooled me,” A.L. said. “I know the parents are the first place we look but I have to admit, I didn’t like either Troy or Leah for this.”

“Same,” Rena said. “I hope our guts were right.”

“We’ll know in five minutes.”