Even with Peter Crane awaiting trial for the kidnapping and attempted murder of Anne, there were people in town who simply refused to accept the idea of Crane as a murderer.

Vince knew from long experience that killers hid behind all kinds of masks and came from all walks of life and all socioeconomic groups. Most people didn’t want to believe that their next-door neighbor or their insurance man or day care provider could be a killer. They wanted killers to look like Gordon Sells.

Gordon Sells, the uneducated owner of a salvage yard outside of town, had been a person of interest in the See-No-Evil cases. He was a rough-looking, dirty person. He had done time for child molestation. The public would have gladly accepted Sells as the perpetrator.

In fact, human remains had been found on Sells’s property, and Sells had since been charged with homicide on a former missing persons case in another jurisdiction where he had been tried and convicted. But the point was, Peter Crane had been just as guilty of crimes just as terrible, if not worse.

The face of evil could be handsome just as easily as it could be frightening.

Vince remembered when Ted Bundy had been sitting in jail in Colorado awaiting trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell, a number of influential political people in his home state of Washington had raised money for his defense.

Despite the fact that Bundy had already been convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in a Utah penitentiary for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch—one of the lucky few Bundy victims to survive—and had also been conclusively connected to the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old high school girl, Debby Kent, Bundy’s supporters couldn’t believe the Ted they knew—smart, charming, handsome, articulate; a volunteer on a suicide hotline; and up-and-comer in local conservative politics—could possibly have committed a vicious sexual homicide.

Now those well-meaning people had to live with the idea that after escaping jail Bundy had probably used the money they had sent him to fund his trip to Florida where he had brutally attacked five female students at Florida State University, killing two, and days later abducted and murdered a twelve-year-old girl.

Evil made its home wherever it could, wherever the conditions were right, wherever that elusive toxic mix of nature and nurture curdled a soul and warped a mind.

What had that cocktail done to Zander Zahn? Vince wondered. A family history of mental illness. A known history of physical and psychological abuse by his mother. A brain that was hard-wired in a way that complicated his attempts to relate to other people. What might all those ingredients produce if the conditions were wrong? A flashback? A rage? A memory of betrayal? A need for revenge?