The only stumbling block was getting them into the river without being seen.

West Island Avenue followed the contour of the Mississippi but curved sharply away from the river when it arrived at the entrance to the wedding pavilion. With a sleeping Sadie Vauk in the back, Gavin drove down the avenue twice, looping past the pavilion to see if anyone might be walking the paths or loitering in the parking lot of the nearby inn. At three o’clock in the morning, everything seemed quiet.

On his third pass he stopped, looked around one last time, and then backed his Bronco onto a walking path. Only thirty feet off the avenue, Gavin found a spot at the edge of the river beyond the reach of the nearby streetlights. He knew that spot; he had been there before.

As Gavin slid her out of the back of the Bronco, she acted lethargic and drowsy, more conscious than Gavin would have liked. He thought he heard her say the word “No,” her voice thick with sleep. None of the others had been able to speak. Had he used enough of the drug? If she’d ever imbibed liquid ecstasy, say at a club, she could have built up a tolerance. He had no way to account for that.

“Right over here,” Gavin whispered as he walked her to the edge of the river. He set her in the grass atop the six-foot embankment and slipped over the edge, finding his balance on the slippery rocks.

Sadie was trying to open her eyes. That hadn’t happened the other times. And Sadie’s legs seemed less wobbly. He had to drag the others to the river’s edge, but Sadie had managed to put one foot in front of the other, leaning on him to remain upright. Would she put up a fight when he pushed her face under the water?

Gavin took ahold of Sadie’s left wrist and she tried to pull away, a feeble effort. When he tightened his grip, she opened her eyes enough to look at him, but then she closed them again, pinching them tight as if trying to solve the riddle of how she had come to be in this place, with this man. Gavin felt a spark of charity—knowing that she would soon be dead—and in that moment of benevolence, he answered the question that he thought she was pondering. “All you had to do was be nice, Sadie.” He hadn’t prepared his words, so they dripped thick with his lisp. Then he grabbed her other wrist and yanked her over the edge of the bank.

Right away he understood his miscalculation. He had expected her to be heavy and inert, a bag of rocks like the others, but Sadie stumbled into him, sending them both tumbling toward the river.

Gavin spun backward, letting go of Sadie and grabbing a branch to keep from falling. Sadie sailed past him, crashing down the steep embankment, twisting on the rocks, and plunging into the water, crying out in pain just before the river swallowed her.