The bag was not for her shoes. Amanda had nine identical pairs of pink Converse shoes. The ones by the creek could wait. Instead, she took the garbage bag and wandered out the front door and around the side of the house, down the darkened passage by the bushes, past the spot where the paling was missing. She went to the darkest corner of the empty yard, far beyond the reach of cameras flashing inside the house, sparkling behind the curtains. She glanced around, and when she was sure it was safe, Amanda knelt by the fishpond.

Bran and Jay, killers and thieves, had been stupid on many levels. But not seeing that the fishpond was clearly where their treasure lay was a real clanger, Amanda thought. Cash, hoarded and saved over decades, would not be concreted into a garage floor. The old man faced hefting a jackhammer up with his spindly arms and nearly giving himself a stroke just to get at it. Because what was the point of saving wads of cash like that, a childless old couple doing the grocery shopping, waiting for pension day, saving their receipts in case of misappropriation? To view, of course. To hold. To know. Because Tom Songly had been a corrupt cop. One of the biggest, the most powerful. He’d managed to scrape through the hellish consequences of the corruption inquiries of the 1970s and 1980s unscathed. He’d gotten away with it. He was not going to bury his takings. No way.

There would be people out there, disgraced cops who had gone to prison after the inquiries, who would want their money back when they got out. And there would be rumors, of course, of his having the money that circulated among men who were not cops and who had never been. Jailhouse gossip. Old Tom Songly would have wanted the money accessible so that he could give some of it out if he was ever threatened. Pay his own ransom. Keep the hounds away from his door, if they were ever so brazen to come.

So the garage floor was out. The idiots had been through the walls, the roof, under the house, under the tiles, under and over and through every surface of the old couple’s possessions. But Songly would never have hidden the money inside the house. A search warrant by local cops wanting to try their luck with a shakedown would turn up the money too quickly. Tom’s hiding place needed to be not the second, or third, or fourth place they looked, but the very last. A place so obscure that it would take time to think of. Too much time for a quick smash-and-flip search.