Luke had reached his car door but stopped short of opening it. He looked at Montecino over his shoulder. She stood straight and cool, not a drop of perspiration on her face.

“Did you know that almost half of all mass shooters turn the gun on themselves, or commit suicide by cop?” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “Maybe it’s self-loathing, or the fear of infamy—of shame. But some forensic psychologists believe it’s the guilt, that they simply cannot live with what they did.”

“I’m depressed and lonely,” Luke said, surprised to hear himself speaking out loud; Tera Montecino was not a woman with whom he would ordinarily share such truths. “I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’m doing. I can’t see a future for myself.”

Montecino showed nothing. She was unaffected. A piece of flint.

“It was a cry for help.”

“That doesn’t always work, does it? Crying for help.” She stepped forward and dropped her ass onto the hood of his car. She wasn’t finished with him yet. “If it did, your wife might still be alive.”

Lisa had been missing for 1,134 days. Luke had counted every one of them, and had relived the first several days—sleepless, surreal stretches of time—over and over again.

For him, the nightmare began when he woke up in the woods to find the front of his shirt covered in blood. He’d thought it was his—a nosebleed, perhaps, even though there was no dried blood around his nose. The gaps in his memory were cavernous, but this seemed the most likely explanation. Or maybe he’d gotten into a fistfight and the other guy had bled all over him.

Sure. Why not?

It was only later, when the crime lab had done its work and the blood came back as Lisa’s, that Luke began to realize the extent of his trouble.