What did the hooded young guy have to do with Molly? With our family photos? With the night Belinda died? His visits could not be a coincidence. And they carried a definite message, be afraid, presumably meant for Stefan. But Stefan had not been with me on my little fact-finding journey. So he meant to scare me. Why me? I didn’t kill anybody. This was part of...something. It made no sense. Maybe it made no sense because you have to be crazy for it to make sense.

How could this guy creep around for months without anyone else but me ever seeing him, except for that one time on the highway on the way back from the prison?

But since then, it had only been me. Was there an image? I realized that I hadn’t checked the CCTV across from the parking lot at Ferber Humanities Hall. I made a mental note to suggest that someone from campus police do that, if they preserved the surveillance tape that far back and didn’t tape over it. What did I care if they thought I was nuts? They probably already thought I was nuts.

The other thing I thought about were those cases, maybe not even a dozen, but I’d read about them. All you had to do to find out about them was to open the trap door under human doings and drop down into the darkness. They were those cases in which the police had photos of a suspect, perhaps even video, even a few seconds of voice recorded on a victim’s phone, and they still couldn’t identify the person. They had eyewitnesses who could describe people well. The eyewitnesses watched as a short middle-aged man with cropped ginger hair sprinted across a picnic park to grab two fourteen-year-old cousins, by the shoulder and force both of them into a minivan (silver, with a tan interior, possibly leather). In yet another unsolved case, at least two observers heard an eighteen-year-old girl cry out for her father and the shriek of her personal alarm when it deployed. The witnesses saw two men, both of them wearing stocking caps with Chicago Bears logos, both of them wearing navy-blue quilted jackets. One of the women, whose big German Shepherd was roaring and straining at his leash, and who said she would regret the rest of her life that she didn’t let the dog go, was close enough to heard a man’s rough grumble instruct “Jerry” to “get her to shut up.”

Yes, those witnesses told police; yes, that drawing the sketch artist made looked like the guy who was shorter. Yes, the guy who seemed older was over six feet tall. They would tell police about that summer evening near the old dam in detail—but not until two days after the teenager’s body was found. They didn’t come forward. They didn’t want to get involved in somebody else’s business.