“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“A mirage,” Matty said. “Something to get our hopes up before it disappears.”

“That’d be our luck,” Niki said. “Your car or mine?”

* * *

With badges and a search warrant, they passed the tellers at the post office and went straight to the branch manager, an affable man with a Santa Claus beard who—once he saw the warrant—delivered the certified letter. Niki looked at it, grinned, and showed Matty.

Hideker’s Towing and Impound.

Niki opened the envelope and read.

Mr. Gavin Spencer,

This letter is to inform you that your vehicle:

1986 Ford Bronco (blk) Minnesota plate number DSM-345

has been impounded for: illegal parking.

You have thirty (30) days from the date of this notice to retrieve your vehicle and pay all associated costs and fees. If you do not retrieve your vehicle within that time, your vehicle may be sold at auction or scrapped, and any proceeds from such sale will be held to cover those costs.

* * *

Hideker’s Towing was a small, private operation that cleared cars away from a number of public facilities throughout the city. Because they weren’t on the city’s impound database, Matty hadn’t gotten a hit when he ran the Bronco’s plates. The company had a small lot just outside of city limits, and within ten minutes, Niki and Matty were in the office talking to Oliver Hideker.

“We towed it from a No Parking zone on campus,” he said, looking at the vehicle records. “Ain’t gonna be able to recover our costs, though. Strangest thing. The keys were in the ignition, turned on, and the plug for the oil pan was gone. It’s like they drained the oil and left it running—like they were trying to ruin the motor or something.”

“Can we take a look at it?” Niki asked.

“Absolutely.”

Oliver led the detectives out to the lot. Turning down a row near the end, Niki spotted the Bronco parked nose-out about forty yards away. From that distance, the car beside it blocked her view of the door, so she quickened her pace. When the passenger door came into view, she took it in as if beholding a stunning desert sunrise.

There on the side of Gavin Spencer’s black Ford Bronco was a gray patch, a stain in the shape of a tear.

Chapter 45

Lila spent her Monday morning drafting in-custody complaints, the charges fed by simple facts and well-written police reports. After delivering those documents to Andi, she turned her attention to a name that had been poking at her ever since she left her mother’s house—Silas Jackson.

Through her office’s databases, Lila found the highlights of Silas’s criminal history. She could see when he was arrested, and for what, and in those cases where he had been charged, she had access to all the documents filed with the court. She found that he had been arrested at the age of eighteen for peeping into a neighbor’s window where a fifteen-year-old girl slept. Two years later, he was charged with stalking an ex-girlfriend—although she later dropped the charges. The cherry on top of Silas Jackson’s hot fudge sundae came a year after that, when he slipped into a bedroom at a party and touched the breasts of a woman who was passed out. A roommate walked in before Jackson could do more than partially undress the poor girl. He spent a year in prison for his act.