Even if Jake assumed that Ava had gone to the manor of her own volition, the second question was how likely was it that Mason murdered her? He was clearly mentally capable of it, but physically?

If he had strangled her, would he have been able to remove her fingernails, and then been able to convince his son to dump her body in the vineyard and move her car back to her house? Surely even someone as out of touch with reality as Mason Campbell wouldn’t be so foolish as to dump the body of a woman he had just murdered in his own front yard?

Max Campbell was certainly no fool. Kelly’s hypothesis that Max was so desperate to return to the mainland that he’d help his father cover up a murder was barely plausible. That Max would then risk a long prison sentence to cover up his father’s abhorrent crimes was highly doubtful.

Would it hold up in court? Jake couldn’t see how.

The whole scenario was too thin. It felt like a case no overworked prosecutor would touch without more evidence to connect the dots.

Why had Kelly pushed to wrap it up prematurely? Was he under pressure from Hobart that Jake didn’t know about? Did he need to make an arrest or risk being sidelined? Jake had seen that happen to more than one regional station commander after multiple homicides had occurred in their precinct.

Whatever Kelly’s reasoning, at the deepest level, Jake didn’t believe the investigation was over. Even if he had to do it on his own—and even if it meant going against his superior’s explicit instructions—he would keep pushing until he uncovered the truth.

So, where to start? There had to be something Jake had overlooked. Another party, or set of factors, or event, that he had failed to track down.

In the silence of the office, the heavy tick of the station’s clock beat against Jake's thoughts.

He understood how the girls came to be in the children’s home. He was confident he’d pieced together what had happened to Amelia and Lilith. He knew who had mutilated them and who had raped them. Unfortunately, he also knew where Lilith’s son had gone. It was a long shot, but when the FSST team finally arrived tomorrow and began searching the vineyard, they might find a trace of him.

He wished he could question how an entire town had failed to see that something very wrong was happening at the children’s home. But it seemed the populace had collectively written the girls off and turned a blind eye to anything that might happen to them. That was horrendous but sadly not unusual—ignorance is bliss, as they say.