“The police are going to arrest you, Sylvie.”

Two unmarked police cars lit up at opposite ends of the block. Sylvie could barely breathe as she pleaded. “I have a son. Please—”

“They’re going to charge you with my kidnapping.”

When Niki and Matty got out of their cars, Sylvie slid off her chair and fell to her hands and knees, her sobs heaving in her chest. “I swear I didn’t. I swear.” Lila could only imagine the chaos spinning around inside Sylvie’s head as the world folded in on her.

Then Sylvie looked up at Lila, her cheeks wet with tears and said, “Please…forgive me?”

Niki walked onto the porch, eased Sylvie’s arms behind her back, and ratcheted handcuffs around her wrists. Lila stayed in her chair as Niki escorted Sylvie to the squad car. Only then did Lila feel strong enough to stand and walk to her car, tears blocking her vision.

In her car, Lila sat in silence as Sylvie’s pleas echoed in her head. Could she forgive Sylvie for what she did? They were different people back then, weren’t they? Dumb kids whipped around by torrents of emotion. Lila wanted to believe that Sylvie didn’t know that Gavin would rape her that night, that what happened in the bean field went far beyond what Sylvie had planned.

Then she heard the gentle voice of Dr. Roberts say, Forgiveness isn’t for them. It’s for you.

Chapter 62

Niki read the Miranda warning to Sylvie in the squad car, while Matty stayed in the house with Dylan, waiting for the social worker to arrive. Sylvie jumped at the opportunity to tell her side, repeating, between sobs, that she had nothing to do with the death of Sadie Vauk, swearing that she was at home with her husband that evening.

Niki and Matty had already prepared a search warrant, but in the end, they didn’t need it. Sylvie agreed to let them search her house, telling them where they could find the two letters that Gavin had sent. Because of the text messages, they knew that the letter held a code and easily read the first message: Kill Sadie Vauk. The second letter led them to a URL and photos of Sylvie Jacqueline Dubois posing Lila Nash the night she was raped.

From there, they went in search of Gavin Spencer’s hidden server.

“Think of the IP address as a telephone number,” the tech told Niki. “Every computer has one so they don’t get all mixed up online.” He continued to click away on his keyboard as he talked. “And with an IP address, we can get a longitude and latitude for the server. I should be able to narrow the location down to…Here you go.”

The map on his screen had a pinpoint in Kenwood. When Niki leaned in to read the streets around it, she recognized the address.

An hour later, Niki, Matty, and a crime scene tech named Bug Thomas pulled up to Amy Spencer’s house, a search warrant in hand.