“If she was one of my girls, she’d be the first I’d make alive again.”

David failed to draw a breath. He saw that Jessup heard that subtle silence, and he breathed again, too late.

“Is she one of those bodies you’ve hidden?”

“Question for question, answer for answer. That’s only fair.”

“I’ve answered your questions, Ronny. Unless you mean the car. It was a black Buick sedan.”

“The car don’t matter. What you didn’t answer that matters is—were she a good girl?”

“But I did answer that one. You know I did.”

“You answered it the way you heard it, not the way I meant it.”

“I don’t understand.”

The big man wet his ripe lips with his tongue. The steel ring in the table apron, to which his right hand was cuffed, rattled not as though he was making a frustrated effort to break free, but quietly, as if he trembled with need or excitement. “She a good girl, Mr. Thorne? Were she as good as she looks? When you did her, when you was in her, were she tender?”

In all his meetings with this man, David had never given in to anger, for he didn’t want to waste the next visit assuaging Jessup’s hurt feelings and self-pity, repairing their relationship. And there would be a next meeting, another beyond that, another and another, as long as Jessup allowed, until he stopped playing games and spoke the verifiable truth, whatever it might be. This was David Thorne’s purgatorial passage, his penance, his duty to Emily, and the primary reason that he came to California for two months at a time.

Now he returned the photos to the envelope and closed the clasp and folded his hands on the table and stared at Jessup in silence.

The killer met his stare and produced no more tears. After a while, he said, “If she’d been one of my girls, which I’m not saying she ever were, but if she was and if I could bring her back alive, Mr. Thorne, I wouldn’t bring her back for me. I’d bring her back for you. I really would.”

Each minute David spent with Ronny Lee Jessup was a test of his own sanity.

He picked up the envelope and got to his feet. “I’ll see you in a week. Maybe sooner.”

“I always enjoy your visits, Mr. Thorne. They’re such a special part of my life.”

| 9 |

Friday afternoon, David sat in a window seat, southbound from Sacramento under high iron-gray clouds, winging over the San Joaquin Valley, once the most productive farmland in the world, now in places devastated by the state’s mismanagement of the water supply: decades-old orchards withered brown; vast fields blackened by recent wildfires. The mountains of the Diablo Range rose in the west, stark and sere. Beyond, the coastal plains lay sunless, and the clouds impressed their somber shapes and shadows on the dark waters.