Peach shook her head. ‘Not Justin. If he wanted to know something, he would have asked me. Plus, he meant for me to find this. He wanted me to see it.’

Cab couldn’t pretend to understand. It was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. Lala looked up from the other papers that Justin had hidden away inside the false vent on the roof. ‘We may have bigger problems. Cab, take a look at this.’

Cab sat next to her on the bed. Lala showed him a copy of the photograph that he’d already seen, displaying the article about Frank Macy’s manslaughter plea. Then she turned over more pages. There were other copies of newspaper articles, all of them dealing with Diane Fairmont and her son and the Common Way Foundation. It was like an obsession, but it wasn’t the articles themselves that bothered him. These weren’t copies made from a newspaper. Someone had made copies of these articles and posted them on a wall like a macabre collection of trophies. Like warnings. It was the kind of collage he’d sometimes found after a stalker struck his victim.

He saw more photographs. These were taken inside an empty garage. The bulletin board was in the background, against a foreground of an oil-stained floor. And then more photographs, inside what appeared to be an abandoned house.

‘What is this?’ Cab asked, but he knew what it looked like. A staging ground. The lair of a killer.

He realized that he was staring at the reason that Justin had been murdered. Somehow, Justin had found this place. A place that no one was supposed to know about. Not until after more people had died.

‘The bigger question is where,’ Lala said. She could read his thoughts. She knew what these pictures meant.

She put the last photograph in front of him. It was an exterior shot of a dilapidated chocolate-brown house at a T-intersection, with a Bank Sale sign posted in the front yard. The branches of an old elm tree brushed the roof. The windows were boarded over with plywood.

‘We need to go,’ Cab told her, getting up.

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘I was just there,’ he said. ‘I saw it this morning. It’s two blocks from Diane’s estate.’

49

Garth checked every room on the first floor of the estate, but the security guard wasn’t there. He’d seen him fifteen minutes earlier in the kitchen, with his gun on the table and a croissant in front of him. Now the croissant was half-eaten, and the security guard and his gun had both vanished. Candle wax oozed across a plate, but the candle had gone out, and he could smell smoke in the air.