Ethan parked, and they stepped out into the packed-earth courtyard. Rows of storage units, shuttered and silent, branched off into the darkness in four directions. No one else was there at that hour.

“Are you ready for this?” Ethan asked, his voice low.

“I don’t know,” Emma admitted. She took a deep breath, the dry desert air filling her lungs and calming her. “Come on,” she said, giving Ethan’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s get this over with.”

They started down the aisle of buildings hand in hand. The floodlights that lit each unit made their shadows flicker grotesquely across the ground, misshapen and eerie. Their footsteps echoed in the stillness. Farther into the desert, a coyote gave a shrill yip.

The unit numbers were painted on the doors in bright orange, starting with 100. Emma counted out loud as they walked through the aisles. “One hundred fifty,” she whispered. “Two hundred . . . three hundred . . . three fifty—it should be down here, Ethan.” She jerked her head around a corner.

Unit 356 looked like all the others, the numbers stenciled across the folding leaves in the garage-type door. Emma had leaned down to fumble at the padlock when Ethan grabbed her elbow.

“Wait,” he said, handing her a pair of knit pink gloves, which no doubt belonged to his mother, from one of the pockets in his cargo pants. From another he extracted a pair of black climbing gloves and pulled them over his own fingers.

“Good call,” Emma said, tugging on her gloves and grasping the padlock once more. The key was a perfect fit. With an almost inaudible click, the latch sprang free. Emma gripped the door’s handle—and pulled sharply up.

The inside was completely dark. She groped along the wall to find the switch, and a single fluorescent bulb hanging in the center of the unit flickered to life. The unit was large enough to hold an apartment’s worth of furniture or a few hundred boxes—but it was almost completely empty.

Almost.

In the center of the cavernous space, a single manila envelope lay on the floor just under the light. Next to it was a stuffed octopus missing one of its black button eyes. Emma knew that octopus. She’d hugged those blue knit legs countless times as a little girl, whenever she needed comfort. It was her Socktopus, one of the only things she’d brought with her from Vegas.

She slowly walked forward, picking up the stuffed animal and staring down at it. Socktopus had been in the duffel that was stolen from the bench in Sabino Canyon, her first night in Tucson. Whoever took it had acted quickly—it had only been unattended for a few minutes before she’d returned looking for it.

Ethan hung back, glancing at the open door every now and then as if afraid someone would spring out at them. “What is that?” he asked, frowning.