“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Sweeney turned and kicked the wall beside the interrogation room door. It was all she could do not to scream. “Are you serious? Are you fucking serious? I don’t care who’s going to these underground weirdo sex parties or how fucking important they are. I’m trying to find out who murdered two kids!”

“Well, word is getting around to the very important people that the hostess of their ‘underground weirdo sex parties’ is giving an official interview, and that is going to cause mass panic if we don’t shut it down right now.” Chief Clark’s whisper was hard and low, like a snake’s hiss. “I’m not going to field calls from magistrates and celebrities and fucking politicians all day long reassuring them that their dirty little secrets aren’t going to be on the cover of the paper tomorrow just because you don’t have any other leads.”

“I have other leads!”

“Great. Drop this one and get on to them instead.”

Chief Clark tugged open the door to the interview room.

“Cooked it with garlic and olive oil?” Amanda was leaning over the table, mouth agape, embroiled in gossip with Claudia Flannery. “Did you taste some? What was it like?”

“Get out, Amanda.” Sweeney jerked a thumb toward the door, defeat making her limbs seem heavy as lead. “Ms. Flannery, you too.”

When I left the house, Dale was sitting on the porch in the sun staring idly at the list of convicted sex offenders in the area of his home, shifting the pages slowly, eyes wandering over the faces there. It seemed a dangerous thing to leave him doing. He’d been shocked to learn the number of registered offenders in his local area, and I didn’t think that shock was eased by the fact that of the twenty-one people listed in the fifty kilometers from where Claire was abducted, only two had been convicted for sexually assaulting a child. In the collection were men who had raped or molested adult women, their wives or an acquaintance usually, but in one case a woman at a nursing home where the offender worked. There was one female offender on the list, a teacher who had been convicted of sexually molesting a teenage boy. The rest were made up of child pornography charges.

I’d watched Dale looking over the pages for a little while, knowing exactly the kind of dark thoughts that were swirling through his brain. It’s a shock to learn for the first time that there are far more sex offenders around in polite society than the newspapers report. Gang rape and child rape make the national news, but a man’s drunken rape of his neighbor after a house party doesn’t. It’s shocking to learn that they exist at all, and then shocking again to learn that they sometimes go on after serving their time in prison to live relatively ordinary lives working at the local store or sitting down with a friend to coffee on the front porch, or walking their kids to school.