“Yes, we do.” Emma meets his eyes. “We actually do. We’ve been given a job, and we’ve come all this way, and… it’s important.”

He pauses. “Do you need to be angry at me? To let off steam before this happens?”

In that moment, of him offering to be her release valve, Emma realizes she can stabilize on her own. She can do this. She has been in far worse situations and survived.

“No,” she says, softening. “No, I don’t need to be angry at you.”

“Okay. Phew.” Bell’s lip quirks. “Because we can do that, but I’m betting you’ve got a mean right hook.”

She blows out air, almost surprised into laughter. “The meanest.”

“Lewis.” He doesn’t touch her but it’s as if she can feel a steadying hand anyway. “Can you run through this?”

“Yeah.” She firms her feet. “Yes. I can run through this.”

“Then we’re good.” He turns at the sound of keys in the door lock. “Okay, we’re on.”

Now here, the door is opening, and they are in the presence of their first juvenile serial killer. Clarence McMurtry is accompanied by a guard, a heavyset man who looks bored. McMurtry seems younger than seventeen in the orange prison jumpsuit, and he does not look bored. His bulgy eyes have a gleam. He seems to shiver with contained energy.

This boy is not Daniel Huxton. This boy isn’t in his forties; he’s barely old enough to drive. Physically, he’s a world away from Huxton’s paunchy brawn. But there is something about him that resonates in the same way, like a musk that Emma recognizes.

It’s a scent that hovers, always, in the back recesses of her mind. She breathes through her mouth. Giving in to it, falling into a memory of Huxton now, in this room, would be the end of everything. She needs instead a symbolic memory, and when she scrabbles inside herself and finds one, she latches on to it hard.

It is a memory of her mother in the barn, wearing rain boots and holding a stainless steel carving knife. Their farm has run dairy cows for longer than Emma has been alive, and it has always been her father’s practice to select a few young steers to butcher for the family. The carcasses are hung in a concrete-floored room in the barn for about a week to cure—the room is the perfect temperature and humidity for dry aging.

Her mother checked the carcasses daily, sometimes twice daily if there was a hot spell.

“Smell that,” she said to Emma, offering up a strip of backstrap. “That there’s done. And this one here is spoiled. Can you tell the difference?”

Emma learned to tell the difference. Now her nostrils flare again as McMurtry is set across from her at the table. She’s got it now; she knows what she’s dealing with. Confident her instinct still holds, she sits down.

The same instinct gives her a basis of approach: to sympathize, wheedle, compliment. Not too many compliments—McMurtry is a talker, he’ll pick up on obvious flattery. She’ll need to be direct. And let him brag.