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Dedication

For my daughter, Rianne, the young Queen of Hidden Things, who is not Carly, but made Carly real for me.

And for all the fine hidden things that make all of us who we are.

Epigraph

Try to put well in practice what you already know, and in so doing, you will in good time discover the hidden things you now inquire about.

—Rembrandt

CHAPTER ONE

The video had been watched only forty-four times before Carly Liddell’s attacker was identified to the police. Viewer number forty-four was the prize tipster, and it was a good thing it was all resolved quickly. The young man in the video had killed a turtle over a span of hours one dull Saturday a decade earlier, at the age of nine, in the early weeks of the same summer he’d set his first fire. Since then, matches, rocks, the heel of his shoe, the long drop over the railing of a bridge, and other weapons of juvenile destruction had been urgently fascinating to him in ways that got him into trouble when he was a boy, in ways he’d learned to hide over the years.

He’d been stealing things, lately. And watching women.

He always would have made the news.

The video, a sloppy edit of footage from a home-security system, went on to become something of a phenomenon. It had been cut together in a hurry by a tech-savvy officer in the cybercrimes unit who was good with that sort of thing. It went up on the police website less than twenty minutes after the flash drive, loaded with the raw recordings from the home’s monitoring surveillance, had been plugged into his computer. Backslaps and high fives all around for that one.

The local news stations had rushed to repost it. It was a civic duty, of course. But at least as good as all that, it was irresistible: a heart-stopper in three acts that clocked in at under half a minute.

By the end of the next day, it had been uploaded to more than a dozen YouTube accounts.

In seventy-two hours, nearly a quarter of a million people had seen fourteen-year-old Carly Liddell come into the frame from the top right, her face pixelated to anonymity in every shot.